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Renters in homeowner societies like Australia, the United States and United Kingdom occupy a complex moral landscape, maligned for failure to achieve homeownership but pivotal to the value of investment properties. Identification of 'good' and 'risky' tenants is an important landlord practice. We investigate how tenants conceptualise and perform the 'good tenant' through research with 36 single older women renting in greater Sydney, Australia: a cohort on the margins of secure housing. The good tenant demonstrates responsibility through paying rent on time and property stewardship (reporting repairs, making home). However, these practices are made necessary and risky through limited tenure security. The emotional and financial risks attending performances of the good tenant drive paradoxical relations; a good tenant is also acquiescent and silent, not reporting property repairs or lapsed leases to avoid rent increases and/or evictions. Variegated performances of the 'good tenant' reflect cultural property norms and valorize the investment function of housing yet could also productively unsettle tenant-landlord relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Motivated by growing policy and research emphasis on the economic care values of housing (which assume homeownership), this paper investigates how housing figures within household care strategies and practices across tenure. We place housing in two broader frames. First, we attend to the care values of housing, conceptualising the purpose and value of housing across tenure through a political ethic of care. Second, we place housing within broader geographical imaginaries of housing and home, attending to how care practices are negotiated within and through the house-as-home. We then bring together two distinct but connected in-depth qualitative case studies, both located in metropolitan Sydney, Australia, to identify the affective, temporal and material dimensions of care and bring focus to the care work and opportunities that owner-occupied, private and social rented housing afford to residents. Tenure intervenes in possibilities for household caring. It is most fully actualised through secure ownership and inhibited for renters and social housing tenants. Evaluating affordances and constraints of tenure and how they drive household care strategies is crucial in a political climate where the care securities of homeownership are prioritised. It demonstrates the limits of liberal care philosophies and raises questions around attributions of care responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Active ageing' has become core to ageing policy internationally. This paper argues that housing, and specifically home purchase, is fundamental to the governance of active ageing in liberal welfare states such as Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. Specifically, the paper expands understanding of how neoliberally inflected active ageing agendas are advanced in conjunction with housing consumption, and builds new knowledge of the governance of asset-based welfare, the investor subject, and housing marginality, showing how these practices and identities are governed temporally through ideas about what it means to age well. Arguments are advanced through analysis of Australian government ageing and age-connected housing strategies in the 20 years to 2015. These strategies construct three key connections between housing and ageing. First, housing is framed as a base (or location) for active ageing, with secure, appropriate and affordable housing depicted as enabling participation. Second, home ownership is positioned as an individual responsibility. In this framing home ownership becomes a 'choice' and means through which individuals can demonstrate responsibility by self-insuring against the fiscal risks of older age. Third, home ownership is connected to the activation of ideal ageing identities by enabling home owners as productive agers (the home as a form of income) and active consumers (home as a resource to fund prudential and age-defying consumption in older age). Significantly, in framing home ownership as an individual responsibility and choice the importance of structural factors shaping housing access are downplayed. This is a question of key geographical significance, foregrounding an interlinked agenda of not just how, but where, ageing should take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]